WITNESS

Submitted by WITNESS on Mon, 2011-07-25 12:03

Organization's slogan:

See It. Film It. Change It.

WITNESS uses video to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. WITNESS empowers people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change.

WITNESS envisions a just and equitable world where all individuals and communities are able to defend and uphold their human rights.

WHAT WE DO

CAMPAIGN: WITNESS partners with human rights organizations around the world to bring the power of video into their existing campaigns and advance human rights causes around the world. For example, videos from these collaborations have helped shed light on the systemic repression of ethnic minorities in Burma, prosecute recruiters of child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and pass the first law protecting elders from abuse in the US.

TRAIN: A key component of WITNESS' mission is to inspire and engage others to use video for change. We embrace a collaborative process that involves both teaching and learning from the human rights community. Whether we're building our partners' capacity to use video in their campaigns, holding training sessions with activists from all over the world, or participating in shared learning online, we are enabling more and more activists to bring their own human rights stories into the open to campaign for change.

LEAD: The rise of technology has allowed the world to participate in video advocacy. But with new technology and new ways to communicate, there is also a need for a better way to protect the safety, dignity and human rights of all. In this new environment, WITNESS is playing a key role to influence and shape practices around the safe use of video online and offline

PRESERVE: While WITNESS is working to secure the future of human rights video, we are also helping to preserve its past. Human rights videos serve as a living record of history and can be a vital component in the prosecution of crimes. The WITNESS Media Archive contains thousands of hours of human rights video and is dedicated to the preservation and accessing of rare and politically sensitive media. It is one of the most diverse and important human rights video collections in the world and an invaluable resource to a global community. Its existence ensures that the history of these abuses is never forgotten and, hopefully, never repeated